So, of all my childhood memories, there is one that stands above the rest. And that is the time that my brave parents rented an RV, packed it with me and my brothers, and drove west from our house in Minneapolis, out to Yellowstone National Park.

We saw all the sights, like the geysers, we stopped at the Badlands, but more than any of the places, I remember this as an adventure. This was my introduction to the Wild West.

But it wasn’t until I got older and I learned more about the National Park System that I realized just how lucky I was. One, to have that experience, but also that, hundreds of years ago, people had the foresight to set aside the very best places, the very best ecosystems in the country, for everyone. And for future generations.

And to really appreciate just how prescient that idea was, you have to go back and you have to look at the history of the National Parks Service.

So, a lot of people know, the first national park was Yellowstone, in 1872. A lot of people think of John Muir, the poet, naturalist, who was such a visionary in getting people inspired by the idea of conservation — that we need to take the best places and protect them.

He had an audience in very high places — there’s a great story of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir going hiking, in Yosemite, during his presidency, four days, completely off the grid, just the two of them. Can you imagine a president actually just going completely off the grid for four days? No tweeting. Like that idea.

But he had a great impact on Theodore Roosevelt. And he created dozens of national parks, hundreds of thousands of square acres of national wildlife refuges. It was an important administration, but it wasn’t a done deal. Even less than 10 years after he created all of those new places, the future of those places was very much in doubt.

And it wasn’t until this guy, Stephen Mather, a businessman from Chicago, wrote an angry letter to the Department of the Interior, saying, “You guys aren’t doing a good enough job protecting and preserving these places.”

Then, something was done about it. The Department of the Interior wrote him back “Mr Mather, if you care so much about this, why don’t you come to Washington and do it yourself?” And he did.

He took a job at the Department of the Interior, but more importantly, he started a campaign. He actually had a meeting two blocks from here, in 1914, in California Hall, and he brought together the park superintendents and a few other people who cared about this idea of conservation.

And they put together a plan, they hatched a campaign that eventually led to the National Park Service in 1916. And that’s really important. Because it went from an idea that we should protect these places to an actual plan, a way for people to enlist and carry that idea forward for future generations, so little kids like me can go and have these amazing experiences.

That is the history of the National Parks on land.

The ocean, what I want to talk to you about today, is a completely different story. And we are almost precisely 100 years behind.

So, the first marine sanctuary was in 1972, after the oil spill in Santa Barbara, people got interested in taking that concept and applying it to underwater environments. We’ve had our own John Muir, who’s Dr Sylvia Earle, who’s been a tireless advocate for creating these marine protected areas around the world.

So, I know there’s a lot of bad news about the ocean, there’s plastic pollution, coral bleaching, over-fishing — it’s hard to take it all in sometimes. But this idea of setting aside places for nature is working.

Science tells us that if you set these places aside, nature will come back and we can keep the oceans healthy. So we know this idea works.

And Dr Sylvia Earl has been influential, like John Muir, with administrations — George W Bush and Obama were both fantastic ocean presidents, creating marine protected areas all around the country. This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea, it’s not even an American idea, it’s just a good idea.